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Technology and Aging Developments – April 2017 Newsletter

Mon, 05/01/2017 - 11:46 - Laurie Orlov

April -- a veritable shower of data, press announcements, and pitches. It was a short but information-filled month of events, announcements, pitches. The month marked our first foray into the American Community Survey Census data about technology usage of older adults. Much more is possible with this data – including greater inspection of housing, family structure, income as correlated with technology interest (including telehealth). Each of the April blog posts can be (re)read in full by clicking on the paragraph heading.

Market sizing, trending, and targeting all depend on data. Marketers understand this – and their sources, Nielsen, Pew Research and AARP have, for many years, provided data food for marketers. And so every tech company ever launched builds its business case on tech adoption trends (and gaps) derived from these sources. So what’s the survey population makeup? Consider Nielsen (global, online, n=30,000); Pew Internet use (US, 2015 n=3004); and AARP (US, 2016, n=1500). These are all declared to be statistically valid samples. But what if the sample size was 3.5 million households, comprising 1% of the US population, as was the case in the last three years of American Community Surveys (ACS) as collected by the US Census Bureau?

AARP’s Innovation 50+ Live Pitch -- what's new? This marathon tried to put 20 pounds of entrants (culled from many more) into the 10-pound bag of a two-day pitch event across two broad categories. So following this trend towards compression, we will leave FinTech to others and just focus on the Caregiving Health Technology firms. While the pitch may be new, some, as noted, may not be new. Placed in context by taking note of what’s in (or was in) market and similar to these finalists. In the alphabetical order presented and updated with winners noted in the post -- link to available websites or descriptions.